Chapter Thirty The Departure
Chapter Thirty
The Departure
When I got to Toby’s office, he was, as I so often found him, sitting at his desk, shopping online. I knocked on the doorjamb.
“Hey,” he said without his usual grin. “Get in here.” I sat in that uncomfortable green chair with my flawed ass one last time. “You put up the wrong episode, and my guys are having some problems with the system. I want you to go in and take it down. We’ll restore it to what it was supposed to be, and we’ll put it out next week.”
“Toby.” I laughed. “It’s way too late for that. They’ve already heard it. You know you can’t do that. Besides, the old episode we cut, the one you signed off on, is…you’re not going to find it.”
“We have backups.”
“I know. You made me write all the documentation. You’re not going to find it.”
“It’s unacceptable for you to put something out without getting your sign-offs. You’re going to get a warning.”
“Don’t bother. Everybody on the team signed off. That’s everybody I care about.”
He shook his head. He didn’t seem as angry as I expected. It was like he was affronted, but he didn’t really care, like he was going through the motions of being pissed off. Finally, he just said, “What in the hell is going on?”
I showed him the email, the very special email I had inadvertently received, and I watched him read it, read it again, and read it again, apparently in the hopes that if he kept on reading it, it would change in front of his eyes. And then he started to talk. About my responsibilities, and what I owed him, and how much trouble I could get in at any other company, and on and on and on, and I didn’t listen. For once in my life, I just couldn’t be bothered to pay attention.
Instead, I looked at the tops of his bookshelves, where a handful of niche awards few people outside our industry had ever heard of sat in a neat row. Best New Show. Best Investigative Podcast. Best Relationship Podcast. Best Subscriber Content. I looked at him, and he looked smaller, older. He’d read as pretty cool at one time. He’d turned fifty last year, and it had to burn his bacon that his fleece-vest years were flying by, to be followed before he knew it by his thick-knit cardigan years.
He had, I realized, stopped talking. “Any questions?” he asked.
“Oh, I wasn’t listening, sorry. But wait, I do have one question. You want to tell me why I ran into Justin on the street yesterday?”
He made a contemplative and very serious face, like he was about to let me in on a national security issue. “Can I count on your discretion?”
I didn’t even know if I wanted to know. I could easily imagine going the rest of my life without ever learning what bomb he was holding in his hand. “I don’t know. For how long?”
“For about two hours,” he said. “We’re making an announcement today. We’re being acquired.”
There was the bomb going off. “By who?”
“By Caravan. And Justin was here because they’re also buying his company. He’s being hired as their director of podcasts, and he’s running point on this acquisition from the editorial angle.” When I didn’t say anything, he went on, “They’re buying us, Cecily. And that means whatever you want to do with your career, you’re going to be taking it up with them, and I really think they’d like to have you on board.”
“You mean he would,” I said. “You mean Justin would like to have me on board.” I laughed and looked around the office. “I thought he was doing a new show with Paul Casper.”
“He is. That’s a collaboration. Paul will carry the bonus content in one of his feeds, Caravan will carry the main show. It’s meant to raise the profile of the division. Which is going to be us, plus a couple of other places they’re planning on buying that are smaller than we are.”
“And what about you?” I said. “Are you staying or going?”
“I’ll be here for six months for the transition,” he said. He did not add the part he didn’t need to add, which was: and then I will take the many, many millions of dollars they just gave me and spend it on online shopping while boring my next wife to tears. This was why he didn’t really care that we changed the finale. Toby wasn’t thinking about my dumb show, he was thinking about all the money he was about to make.
Caravan had started as a video company. And then it became a content company. And since then, it had become a devouring company. And nobody there was going to care about the people who were gobbled up when it acquired Palmetto. Charlie. Abby. Brick. Kevin. Carl the business guy. You only need so many people. Synergy, which is another word for making human beings unnecessary, is the whole point. “So,” I said, “when you promised me that we’d make a pilot of my show if I did this, you knew you couldn’t make it happen. Because by then, somebody else would be in charge.”
“I didn’t know that for sure,” he said. “Things like this take months to close. Our partnerships people brought in Eliza, I thought it was a good idea, it’s that simple.”
“You knew,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What matters is that you have colleagues here, and they’re going to look to you for help with this adjustment.”
Bossy bossy bossy Cecily will be in charge of it.
“Toby,” I said, “I will not be helping with this adjustment.”
“I’m really disappointed to hear that,” he said. “I’ve thought of us as family, and I thought you did, too.”
“You know, I don’t have a perfect family,” I said. “They drive me crazy sometimes. We don’t communicate that well. I go a long time without seeing my parents. I’m pretty sure they are at two different wellness retreats on two different continents as we speak. We argue about where to do Christmas and what kind of stuffing to have at Thanksgiving, and sometimes somebody is too critical or wants to borrow money. But if my mother sold my family to a bigger, more profitable family and didn’t give me any of the money, I like to think she wouldn’t expect me to smooth it over with my sister.” I stood up and started to leave.
“You matter to me, Cecily,” he said to my back.
I stopped. I turned around. “Fuck you, Toby. I quit.”